1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computing systems, and deals more particularly with techniques for providing a task interface for users of Web-accessible applications, such as console applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computer software and hardware systems are often configured, monitored, and managed by one or more administrators using graphical user interfaces called “consoles”. Often, each system component within an information technology (“IT”) environment has its own independently-developed console for carrying out these operations. Even a relatively small business can require a number of different computer-based products (including hardware components and/or software components) for its business solution, and a large business or other enterprise may have a very large number of such products in its IT environment.
A number of problems with prior art consoles have been described in the related inventions titled “Using Content Aggregation to Build Administration Consoles” (U.S. Pat. No. 7,493,563) and “Federating Legacy/Remote Content into a Central Network Console” (U.S. Pat. No. 7,444,633), and solutions to those problems are described therein.
A problem not addressed in the related inventions is that Web-based consoles have been limited in their capabilities because of the lack of a standard, shareable infrastructure to support task-based user interfaces. Task-based user interfaces are quite common today in desktop  computing environments and operating systems based on a windowing paradigm where a window is created to represent each active user task. Applications could build their own task-based mechanism, but that is analogous to having to build both the application user interface and the desktop user interface within the application. This build-your-own approach also does not facilitate interactions among application user interfaces or the ability to easily switch from a task in one user interface to a task in another user interface without loss of data, both of which are features that users expect to be present in desktop computing environments.
Without a task-based user interface for Web-based consoles, it may be difficult for users of those consoles to achieve optimum productivity levels. The need for task-based Web user interfaces is not restricted to administration consoles, however. For example, some applications such as word processors may be presented as Web applications. As in a desktop computing environment, a user can be productive if he can manage different instances of the word processor application for different documents that he switches between. Accordingly, what is needed are improvements that provide task-based user interface features in Web-based applications.